Menu

Reflections on meaning and truth

Tree of knowledge

Nothing seems as arcane, academic and sophisticated as philosophy, the discipline of questioning truth and meaning, life and world, and not whatsoever else. Long is the tradition of the philosophizing man, since the youngest day of human thinking, many thoughts about us and our environment have grown, the seemingly more valid ones grew bigger and the seemingly less valid ones were suppressed. Thus, philosophic history has grown to a tremendous and ancient tree of knowledge: Every branch sprouted from a former root to bloomy novelty. Important is to note that not the highest blossoms are implicitly the most delightful, but that beauty comes from the whole tree crown. In diversity resides beauty, speaking about philosophy, truth stems from perspectives. Many philosophy movements, even when apparently contradicting each other, are based on the same perspectivistic principle. In that vain, philosophers always are somewhat artists besides being thinkers, because they add their couleur. The trouble being overweighting the tree of knowledge until its collapse.

At Drunks and Lampposts somebody took the time to visualize the relations between philosophers using Gephi. The affiliation data coming from the official articles of wikipedia.org, he managed to depict a kind of aforementioned tree of knowledge. There is, as well, an another approach of depicting the tree here.

“A close up of ancient and medieval philosophy ending at Descartes and Leibniz”

“The Continental Tradition”

“British Empiricism, American Pragmatism and the Analytical Tradition”